Medill News Service

Elizabeth Shogren

Elizabeth Shogren is an associate professor for Medill in Washington, DC. She teaches graduate and undergraduate reporting and audio journalism classes. 

She came to Northwestern after a rich and varied career reporting for Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, NPR, the Los Angeles Times and other news outlets. At the Center for Investigative Reporting, she created documentary-style radio episodes and podcasts as well as long-form investigative stories. 

Previously, she was an on-air national and science correspondent for NPR.

While at NPR, she was a lead reporter for Poisoned Places, a data-driven series about communities suffering from toxic air pollution. The series received several honors, including a Science in Society journalism award from the National Association of Science Writers. 

Early in her career, as a freelance foreign correspondent, she covered the fall of communism in Eastern Europe before joining the Los Angeles Times’ Moscow bureau. Later, she moved to the paper’s Washington bureau, where she covered the White House, Congress, political campaigns, poverty and the environment. Shogren is based in Washington, D.C.

Matthew Orr

Matthew Orr is an assistant professor at Medill, teaching video and broadcast production. Before joining Medill, Orr was director of multimedia and creative at STAT, a media company at the Boston Globe that tells compelling stories about health, medicine and scientific discovery. While at STAT, he led a multimedia team that won numerous awards, including three Online Journalism Awards, three Webby Awards, a National Headliner Award and a George Polk Award. His work ranged from short Facebook videos that garnered millions of views and several online video series to short and long-form documentaries that have appeared at national film festivals and on broadcast television.

Prior to STAT, Matthew was the first full-time staff video journalist at The New York Times and spent 13 years as a senior video producer and reporter there. He wrote, produced, filmed and edited breaking news, live video, social videos, feature stories, online series and documentaries. His projects included “The Debt Trap,” about the 2008 mortgage crisis; “Breakdown,” an investigation of animal abuse in the horse racing industry; “Portraits Redrawn,” profiles of families affected by the Sept 11 attacks; and “The Last Word,” advanced obit interviews with prominent personalities discussing their legacy that publishes upon their death.

His international reporting experience includes work from China, Japan, Myanmar, Ukraine, Gabon, Democratic Republic of Congo and the Dominican Republic. He is the director and producer of Augmented, a feature documentary that appeared on NOVA on PBS.

Contact: 202.661.0103 or matthew.orr@northwestern.edu

Ivan Meyers

Ivan Meyers is a senior lecturer for journalism courses at Medill, and is director of operations of the Washington newsroom. Meyers holds an undergraduate degree in radio/television/film, as well as a master’s degree in music technology, where he focused on immersive installation experiences. Between degrees, he worked as a production specialist in the eBusiness and digitization department at NBC News in New York. While at NBC, he ushered in a new era of video editing on desktop computers and laid the groundwork to transition the network’s video workflow to a tapeless environment. He has worked at various production and post-production capacities in the Washington , New York and Chicago areas, and also enjoys live event production. He is a professional web programmer, data migration specialist and semi-professional computer science enthusiast.

Meyers oversaw television studio operations at Medill for more than a decade. In addition to video journalism classes at Medill, he has also taught video courses geared for journalists at other institutions, including the National Press Club, the American Red Cross and Georgetown University. After freelancing for many years, Meyers founded Out of the Cave Production and Technology Company, comprising a wide range of multimedia and technological offerings.

HyoJung Kim

HyoJung Kim is an adjunct lecturer at Medill D.C. focusing on Washington reporting and multimedia production.

Most recently, HyoJung was a video journalist at The Washington Post covering breaking news and analyzing political news from Congress, the White House and the campaign trail. She also produced live coverage for headlining events such as Donald Trump’s inauguration and Jimmy Carter’s funeral, and devised social media strategy for the Post’s flagship video podcast “Sidebar.” Previously, she was a producer/editor at the Hill, where she covered national political news and launched “Today in Washington,” a vertical social media video series breaking down the day’s political news. Before that, she was an associate producer at CNN Plus’s Washington bureau, where she produced episodes of “Jake Tapper’s Book Club,” politics special events coverage and the documentary “Never Again: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, A Tour with Wolf Blitzer.” She was also a part of the Hearst Television National Investigative Unit’s awards-winning series “Sucked In: America’s Vaping Epidemic” and the Vice News documentary series “Planet A.”

HyoJung received her master’s degree in journalism focusing on politics, policy and foreign affairs and bachelor’s degree in journalism and theatre from Northwestern University. During her undergraduate years, she was an executive producer for Northwestern News Network, the student broadcast station.

HyoJung is a board member at the National Press Club. She is also a certified FAA drone pilot and a nationally registered emergency medical technician.

Elissa Nadworny

Elissa Nadworny is an NPR correspondent who has covered education, reproductive rights and abortion and international conflict, with a special focus on children and families. 

She has spent several months in Ukraine covering the war with Russia and in Israel, covering the war with Hamas and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

She guest hosts NPR radio shows such as All Things Considered, Weekend Edition and special election coverage.

In 2023, she tracked down a classroom of kindergarteners from eastern Ukraine, displaced by the war. The project took eight months, spanned multiple countries and continents, and told the story of children and families dealing with the trauma, loss, and fear that conflict brings.

Her work has won awards including a James Beard Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award for excellence in innovation, a Scripps Howard Awards for excellence in narrative storytelling and several Gracie Awards.

She’s a Livingston Award finalist for a story about college students getting their degrees from inside a state prison.

Emily Wax

Emily Wax worked at The Washington Post for 27 years and was an award-winning foreign correspondent in Africa and India. She was drawn to stories of how ordinary people struggled to live their daily lives. She profiled college students struggling to stay alive amid Congo’s civil war, and the use of rape as a weapon in Sudan’s war in the Darfur region.

She was named the 2004 winner of the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for outstanding reporting “on the systematic violence threatening millions of people in the Darfur region of Sudan.”

Perhaps more important than awards, her stories on serial rape in Congo prompted a special hospital wing to be opened, and her narratives about the children of parents with AIDS led readers to fund the establishment of an orphanage in Kenya. A foundation, Girls Gotta Run, was inspired by her stories about female runners in Ethiopia. For the last decade, she reported breaking news and did larger narratives about the impact of conflict on veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

She also covered breaking state and federal court cases on the rollback of abortion and transgender rights along with covering countless hurricanes, mass shootings and wildfires.

She became a Story Fellow, writing long form pieces on new and successful approaches to hospice and end-of-life care, which could become models for families struggling through one of the most painful and understudied/taboo periods in American life.

Gracie Cohen

Gracie Cohen is the senior program coordinator for Medill in Washington, DC. In her role, she specializes in operations and events management while providing support to students and faculty.

Gracie brings a strong background in communications, marketing, and event coordination to Medill. Most recently, she served as the publications coordinator at Boston University Tanglewood Institute (BUTI), where she managed and created student recital programs for the Summer 2024 season. Before BUTI, Gracie worked as the communications and marketing associate at Women of Reform Judaism. There, she developed and managed digital and print content, including newsletters, website updates, annual reports, and social media campaigns. She also supported international and domestic conferences.

Gracie is fascinated with language and how we use the power of words to share stories. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Creative Writing from Seattle University and a Bachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Sciences from Portland State University.  Currently, she is pursuing a certificate in Leadership through Northwestern’s School of Professional Studies. 

Outside of work, she enjoys exploring local farmers’ markets, diving into a good book, and trying to maintain her Connections winning streak.